thanks for the correction - I am so used to doing the "sensible" thing of multiplying a string by an integer that I read it as being that way around, especially as that's how the data is stored!
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Andy DentFeb 1 '09 at 18:44

[e[1] * e[0] for e in elt] is a list comprehension, which evaluates to a list itself by looping through another list, in this case elt. Each element in the new list is e[1]*e[0], where e is the corresponding element in elt.